Countdown to the Next NASA Discovery Mission Selection

This article originally appeared on Van Kane's blog and is reposted here with permission.

If NASA’s managers hold to their schedule, we will learn sometime this month what NASA’s next planetary mission will be. This will bring to a close a two-year process that saw 27 teams of scientists and engineers propose missions for the agency’s Discovery program, followed by a winnowing of the field to five finalists. Out of the process should come the selection of one (and if the gods smile, two) missions that will launch in the early 2020s to study either Venus or the asteroids.

The Discovery program funds NASA’s low cost planetary missions (typically $600–700 million for all costs) to allow for more frequent missions. Nine missions have successfully flown through this program to solar system destinations as diverse as Mercury, our moon, Mars, several comets, and several asteroids. (For those who note that the next mission will be the 13th selection, one previous mission failed, another is the Kepler telescope observing planets around other stars, and one is still in development.)

In the first round of this competition, the agency’s managers evaluated the proposals on how compelling their science would be and on their engineering and cost feasibility. This led to the selection of the five finalists:

Artist's concept of the Lucy mission

The Lucy mission would perform flybys of several of the Trojan asteroids that share the orbit of Jupiter. These compositionally diverse bodies are believed to be remnants delivered to their current locations from across the early outer solar system. Exploring these worlds would help us better understand the range of conditions and orbital dynamics of the early solar system.

JPL-Caltech

Artist’s concept of NEOCam

The Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam) mission would use a space telescope to both discover new asteroids (especially those with orbits near Earth’s) and characterize a multitude of know asteroids. The results would be a massive database that could be mined to explore the range of asteroid sizes, compositions, and orbital dynamics to study these worlds as entire populations.

JPL-Caltech / Corby Waste

Artist’s concept of asteroid Psyche and spacecraft

The Psyche mission would orbit the asteroid of the same name, which is the largest metallic world in the solar system. This body may be the exposed remnant center of a protoplanet, in which case it is our only opportunity to explore the core of a world directly. Or Psyche may be an asteroid that formed close to the early sun before later being flung into the main asteroid belt.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

VERITAS

The VERITAS mission would map Venus with radar and infrared spectroscopy.

(In a previous post, I provided more detailed summaries of the goals of each of these proposed missions.)

The teams proposing these finalists have had approximately a year to refine their proposals. The evaluation of the final proposals is reputed to be a tough, rigorous examination looking into all the details for any flaws. Could all the science goals be met? Are there any flaws in the design or proposed testing procedures? Could the mission be implemented within budget? Do all the key personnel proposed for the mission have the experience to execute the tasks assigned to them?

The final evaluations are delivered to NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science, Thomas Zurbuchen, who will make the final decision on which mission to fly. Assuming that more than one proposal survives the technical evaluation wringer, he may include factors such as his judgement of which scientific questions are more compelling or which mission would best balance the overall planetary program (for example, NASA hasn’t launched a mission to Venus since the late 1980s but has launched three asteroid missions since then).

It is possible that Dr. Zurbuchen will announce two missions to fly. When the list of finalist proposals was announced, NASA stated that a second mission might be selected if more than one passed the final review process and sufficient funding was expected in future budgets. Choosing two missions from a single competition would make it easier for NASA to meet its goal of four to five Discovery launches per decade. (The competitions are expensive and time consuming for both the planetary community and NASA.) As recently as this summer, the head of NASA’s planetary science division said that his goal was to make the case for two selections, but statements by other NASA managers have sounded more cautious.

At least two recent events weigh, in my opinion, against a second selection. First the Discovery mission in development, the Mars InSight geophysical station, experienced development problems and will need an additional $154 million to prepare for launch. Much of that money may come from the Discovery program’s budget, reducing funds available for future missions. Second, the new president elect is promising both massive tax cuts and massive new spending on infrastructure. Affording that program may lead to severe budget cuts elsewhere in the federal budget, including at NASA. Budgetary caution may be the smart move.

While NASA’s managers likely will have found it hard to select from a field of excellent candidates, among space enthusiasts there may be a clear favorite. For the past year, my blog site has posted a poll asking readers to select their personal favorites. VERITAS was the clear favorite (48% of votes) followed by Psyche (19%), DAVINCI (14%), Lucy (9%), and NEOCAM (7%). (The poll also asked for votes for a second mission, should one be selected, and the results were similar.) I am surprised that the votes are not more evenly distributed – all the proposals are scientifically compelling. Psyche and Lucy, for example, would be missions of exploration to never before visited classes of worlds. This poll likely represents the personal preferences of planetary exploration enthusiasts (although members of the professional planetary exploration community also read the blog and may have voted), and therefore probably don’t represent the evaluation weightings that NASA’s managers will apply. (So far, over a number of mission selections, my personal favorite proposals have been selected perhaps about 25% of the time.)

In the next few weeks, we are likely to learn which of these proposals will be NASA’s newest approved mission, or missions. Whichever one is chosen, it will add significantly to our understanding of the solar system.

Comments & Sharing

Comments

Your polls were clearly confounded, likely by a large constuency of blog readers in and around Pasadena ;-/

Brian Schmidt: 2016/12/09 12:06 CST

DAVINCI, pretty obviously.
There's this from the link: "DAVINCI will make definitive measurements of hydrogen isotopes that can be used to constrain when and at what rates Venus lost its putative early water oceans."
We could all be putative Venusians, so this would be good to know.
David Grinspoon looks like he's on the team based on the link. He's speculated that life could've survived still today in the cloudbank. I got the chance to ask him some years ago whether he still believed we should test for that, and he said yes, as part of a broader atmospheric sampling and not a dedicated mission. I wonder if DAVINCI gets us any closer.

Mewo: 2016/12/09 02:15 CST

Fingers crossed for Psyche. A mission based on proven technology to the only type of solar system body not yet visited. This one is the clear standout in my opinion.

Nick G.: 2016/12/09 12:32 CST

I hope they pick Veritas, the surface of Venus is not very well known. I was reading this article hoping a mission to Europa would be on the list but that must be on the bigger budget missions. Can't wait to find out more about that moon of Jupiter :D.

Torbjörn Larsson: 2016/12/11 05:37 CST

DAVINCI, for the reasons Brian says. Venus was Earth's twin before it went hothouse and handed that distinction over to the slowly weakening runt of Mars. That is an enigma wrapped in a blanket of time, heat and pressure. A challenge that we should face as soon as we can. If we can grok Venus we may be able to grok the formation and Earth vs Venus analogs of many other planet systems.

Arbitrary: 2016/12/14 07:42 CST

Venus, Jupiter's trojans and Psyche all have potential for big discoveries (the NeoCam mission not so much so, although it maybe gets extra votes for planetary protection now that AIM/DART seems to be scrapped). I would think that Psyche deserves a larger mission with a landing and sample return, if it really is believed to be a planetary core remnant. 31 Euphrosyne is another asteroid of similar mass and density. A problem with Psyche might be the uncertainty in density. It would be a disappointment if turns out to be an average asteroid when the spacecraft arrives. Maybe the decision makers don't want to gamble on that.
Venus I think should have a sustained campaign of small and medium missions. It is the easiest planet to reach. It should be possible to go there as secondary payload at very low cost. ULA offer propulsion for secondary payloads, and hopefully the Planetary Society will establish Solar sails as an option.

Brian Schmidt: 2016/12/16 09:17 CST

Nothing against Veritas (it's my second choice) but:
1. We've had more orbiters more recently at Venus (much more recently) than atmosphere probes. Time to move that science forward.
2. India and China are both capable now of sending orbiters to Venus, so we should try something that they may have more trouble doing.